Other Than Love…

By Esther Liu

Other than love, forgiveness could be the second most preached and talked about topic in the church: the necessity of it, the way to do it, the consequences of not doing it, God’s commands about it and how Jesus modeled it, etc., etc., etc. If there was a ranking system for popular topics in human relationship—as we do with popular TV shows—forgiveness would rank in the top ten. Here we are, devoting the entire edition of this magazine to forgiveness. And there must be thousands of books out there written by Christians and non-Christian writers alike. A simple Google search yields 22 million results. Amazon.com itself carries 5,000-plus titles. Ever wonder why?

I often suspect that the popularity of the topic is in direct relationship with the difficulties surrounding forgiveness. To love our enemies and forgive those who have wounded us deeply indeed seems equally difficult, if not impossible, to do!! However, if you have difficulty loving someone, you always have the choice to walk away. But once wounded by someone, the pain stays with you….coming out at the most inopportune time to pierce your heart again and again. It does not matter if the offender is a thousand miles away or dead. The pain is always alive and well. There isn’t an expiration date on it.

Of course, I am not talking about simple, shallow, everyday irritations of life. The offenses I’m referring to go way beyond that. David needed forgiveness from God after he committed both adultery and murder. Joseph’s brothers trembled at his feet and begged for his forgiveness for selling him into slavery when he was just a young lad. Crafty Jacob set up several “waves” of gifts and servants before his brother Esau because he had cheated, lied and stole Esau’s blessing as the first born. Peter went out and cried bitterly after he had betrayed Jesus, not once, but three times.

Unfortunately, living in a sinful and fallen world, we all experience similar situations in our own lives. Cheating or abusive spouses, back-stabbing co-workers, critical, judging and negative family members, and distant, pre-occupied, condemning parents seem to be everywhere. Some of us have abusive parents. In so many ways, abused children (physically, sexually, or emotionally) were betrayed by the very person who was supposed to love and protect them. These wounds go very deep and hold our souls down tightly. Too many of us have grown up with broken promises, broken homes, and broken dreams.

Over time, we’ve learned not to trust others, not even God. We’ve learned to love conditionally, even in receiving love from God and loving God. We’ve learned to do things to please others and believe that God requires the same. We’ve learned to manipulate situations and people for our own benefit, for surely God cannot be everywhere, every time we need Him. Mostly, we’ve learned to hold on tightly to our pains, like a protective shield, even as God commands (sometimes pleads with) us to forgive, to let go and to trust Him.

This is one of the reasons why I would encourage you to go through the “emotional scale” exercise and make your own genogram I wrote about in my previous articles. To know ourselves and where we are coming from brings light into the darkness in our hearts. Only by raising the awareness and bringing the past hurts and pains to the conscious level and looking at them honestly, openly and directly, can we then begin to talk about forgiveness; forgiveness is a conscious decision to let go, a submission of our will to God, a willingness to trust again, a real heart and soul effort. Only in God’s light, can we walk in truth and be set free. I believe that without the hard work of looking at the issues of hurts and pains in the past, our forgiveness too many times becomes a temporary fix, a surface decision, and a bandage over the wound in place of the true healing.

A book by Elian Hamilton, Leave the Mud and Learn to Soar, is a great book to start. As a young girl, she was sexually abused and her journey to freedom, her training and experiences as a therapist, and the data she has collected over the years made this book both thought provoking and a practical tool. It is a workbook designed to be used in understanding our relationship (or lack thereof ) with God. It is a baby step toward true forgiveness that God intends for us to experience in the love and safety of his embrace.

Is true forgiveness possible on this side of heaven? YES!! There are “great clouds of witnesses” throughout biblical history and human history cheering us on! We are a people of hope and believe in Jesus—our God of Hope—who paid the ultimate price, modeled the greatest love, and offered the true forgiveness.